


Enough

by FeathersMcStrange



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Caffeine Withdrawal, Coffee, Epic Friendship, Fluff, Gen, No Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-20
Updated: 2014-05-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 21:32:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1663181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FeathersMcStrange/pseuds/FeathersMcStrange
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beverly Katz meets Jimmy Price and Brian Zeller on the first day of her sophomore year of high school. </p><p>Fast forward two years to the week of a bet. </p><p>How different her life has become because she accidentally tripped over a kid from her class and spilled decaf chai tea on another kid from her class in a coffee shop before school. </p><p>Literally nothing but unapologetic Beverly + Science Squad friendship with brief cameos ft. Will Graham and Margot Verger. That's it that's all it is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Enough

**Author's Note:**

> First in a series of ten oneshot fics, with the challenge of using five lines of dialogue, selected by a randomizer from a list of lines submitted by my followers. Dedicated to Swan who is lovely in all the ways and also gave me the ‘verse and prompt for this one.
> 
> The five pieces of dialogue for this fic were:
> 
> “don't run into the cactus!”
> 
> “you really didn't guess? after all this time, I didn't give my charade away at all? Damn, i'm that good! Or you're just that desperate.”
> 
> “you know, it wouldn't hurt you to not have the answer to everything.”
> 
> “you know, you make me feel like I might be enough.”
> 
> “you – you're like one of those ridiculous – I don't know – hats – that say 'one size fits all' but actually doesn't fit anyone, because you're – you're made of – awful!”
> 
> Come bug me on tumblr. Give me prompts and I'll probs love you forever.

The coffee shop where they make the pact is actually where they first met. Beverly was thirteen, Brian fourteen, Jimmy fifteen. First day of sophomore year at Chesapeake High and somehow something had led them all to the Java Grind at eight thirty, half an hour before school was slated to start.

It hadn't exactly been a glorious start.

Beverly had spilled her decaf tea on Brian when she tripped over Jimmy's untied shoelace, thus entangling the three of them in what had to have been the most awkward introduction of her young life thus far. Being a thirteen year old sophomore wasn't exactly easy to begin with – youngest person in her grade and all, younger than most of the freshman even – and add to that being a huge science geek and one of maybe literally six Asian kids in a high school in the middle of an area of Minnesota so lacking in diversity it might as well be a prime time television show, and well. Making friends was no picnic.

But then as the three of them tried to embarrassedly sort the situation out Brian had picked up the book on forensics she had dropped and leafed briefly through it. That prompted an excited conversation in which everybody talked over everybody else and they were nearly late for first period, but over the course of that twenty minutes in a coffee shop, the burn of embarrassment fading from her cheeks, Beverly Katz gained two new friends. Brian had skipped one grade to her two, Jimmy had a particular fondness for bees, and both of them seemed genuinely interested in what she had to say.

That had been two years ago.

Now, fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, they stand again in the middle of the Java Grind, waiting for their orders to be called. Somewhere between sophomore and junior years, Beverly had made the jump from tea to coffee, and while the taste was odd at first it was safe to say she was officially hooked. Bickering absently over steam emitting cups had become a pre-school routine of CHS's forensics club's most loyal – and its only – members. That is, until the bet.

Monday, October 12th. Cold enough that the leaves were well into their last dance towards the ground, warm enough that snow still hadn't alit on the Earth that crunched with frost underneath three sets of boots, leaving the Java Grind and setting off on the rather solitary shortcut through a strip of woods to Chesapeake High School.

“I'm just saying, Katz,” Brian singsongs, nearly losing his footing when the toe of his sneaker catches on a protruding rock, “you wouldn't last two days.”

“Two days?” shoots Beverly, cocking one eyebrow. “You're on, Zeller.”

“Pfft. Please.” Jimmy shakes his head, chuckling. “Neither of you is going to make it twelve hours.”

“Are you saying you're in?”

Both Beverly and Brian round on Jimmy, pinning him with twin looks saying very clearly 'I dare you, James Henry Price'.

“...Fine. Yes. I'm in. But let's make it a week.”

After a careful moment of critically eyeing both of them, Beverly holds out her hands, clenched into fists except for the pinky fingers, extended. “Shake on it?”

“I am able to legally vote in nine months, Beverly, I am not pinky swearing on a bet that the three of us can't make it a week without coffee.”

Beverly stares.

Jimmy hooks his pinky through hers.

A moment later Brian follows suit, and then the two of them link their remaining pinkies, forming the same triangle they'd made possibly a dozen or more times before.

“It's a deal then.”

Day one goes relatively well. Everybody is slightly crabby.

Day two is when everything starts to. Well. Slip.

Heading out of the sciences classroom their physics teacher, Miss Fitzsimmons, has to call out “Don't run into the cactus!”, in reference to the succulent garden table by the door, or a blearily half-conscious Brian might have done just that.

Drama finds Beverly (who had an extra space in her schedule right after lunch – nothing to do but fill it with another elective) on stage opposite her scene partner as the girl – a junior named M-something, Mary or Margaret or whatever – delivers her lines gorgeously, Beverly standing there blinking at her.

“You really didn't guess? After all this time, I didn't give my charade away at all? Damn, I'm that good! Or, you're just that desperate.”

Silence for a few beats.

The teacher frowns and Margot – _that_ was the girl's name –, leans forward, waving a hand in front of her face.

“Beverly? I gave you your cue. I said “Or you're just that desperate” here's where you're supposed to respond.”

“What?” Beverly's deer-in-the-headlights look only lasts a few moments before she collects herself, shaking her head. “Right. Sorry. Tired.”

Will Graham, the only person in the room possibly less inclined to take a drama class than Beverly herself, shoots her a sympathetic look. She flashes him a quick smile in return.

For his part, Jimmy seems relatively business as usual – much to the irritation of the other two. That is, until he somehow manages to turn the wrong lever on the bunsen burner in physics, singing his coat in a flame that would have removed an eyebrow had he not been wearing goggles. Beverly and Brian don't even bother trying to pretend they aren't highly entertained by the whole proceeding, especially since it involves the hysterical image of Miss Fitzsimmons throwing the heavy grey wool fire blanket over Jimmy, successfully dousing his arm while having the added effect of making him look like a large grey ghost. The kind little kids dress up as for Halloween, made with a bedsheet and a pair of scissors.

Things clear up somewhat after that, though days are still markedly harder to slog through. They are on the walk home from school and Jimmy is complaining about the way everything seems to be moving through a river of molasses. He mentions that he's slightly perplexed about why it's gotten easier rather than harder as the week trudges monotonously on.

“Caffeine withdrawal,” Beverly says easily, her breath fogging the air in front of her, her freezing hands stuffed deep into her parka pockets. It may only be October, the snowdrifts on the year's horizon but not yet upon them, but it was still cold as. Well, cold as all shit, as Brian had so eloquently put it the day previously. “It hits you hard the first day or two – especially if you've been used to consuming sixteen ounces of coffee every morning straight for about two years – and then it gets easier. Technically we should be able to quit coffee entirely after this.”

They all stop and look at each other for a beat or two before the simultaneous 'nahhh' echoes through the bare-branched trees.

“You know, it wouldn't hurt you to not have the answer to everything.”

Brian sounds vaguely reproachful, but Beverly is certain it has very little to do with actual animosity and more to do with the fact that she had thoroughly kicked his ass in Physics Class Jeopardy two class periods ago.

It's Friday, and so they do what they have done practically every Friday since they became the tight knit group they are now – Brian and Beverly climb up to Jimmy's roof and sit on the slightly sloped mostly flat shingle, while Jimmy rummages around in his incredibly cluttered room for the charger extension cord and computer so they can watch the latest episode of CSI.

The sun is hanging low in the sky, casting pastel hues of pink and orange across the cloud studded atmosphere. For some reason – blame it on the lack of caffeine, the overabundance of tea she's been consuming in place of her usual coffee fix – Beverly feels a strange sense of quiet contemplation with the world, sitting beside a slightly shivering Brian, close enough to feel the small tremors running through him. She nudges his shoulder with hers, and he gives her an odd look.

“Everything alright, Bev?”

“Yeah,” she says in a voice as soft as the swirling set of feelings in her chest. She wonders where she would be right now, if she wasn't sitting on the Price family roof, waiting for Jimmy to pass up the laptop and drag out a thick blanket to drape over the three of them while they laugh at Gil Grissom and co.'s pseudoscience and poor lab technique. She wonders what sort of week she would have had, if she hadn't been participating in a childish bet with her two best friends.

The answer hits her a moment later, in the form of 'probably stressing about that English test you took today, English has never been your best subject, Beverly'. They'd sat for an hour on Thursday in the Java Grind, drinking tea and hot cocoa while Jimmy and Brian took turns holding up flashcards and drilling her on the finer points of the Iliad. Patiently explaining to her the difference between a direct object and an indirect object as applied to sentence structure. The following hour was spent on math (Jimmy's weak point), followed by history (Brian could never quite get the details straight).

Beverly looks to her side, finds Brian looking at her with a slightly raised eyebrow.

“Are you _sure_ you're okay?”

It takes her a second to find her words again, and instead of 'yeah, fine, really', out comes “You know, you make me feel like I might be enough.”

The look he gives her now is equal parts understanding and something else, and it looks like how she feels right now. In the rational part of her mind, Beverly is aware that she should feel silly right now, but she's tired and it's Friday and the sky looks really nice, and she cannot imagine anywhere she would rather be right now than on a roof with the two biggest nerds she has ever met.

'Enough' is hard for her, the prodigy who jumped over two grades before she was thirteen, placed in the Talented And Gifted program (not the support system it should have been but a badge on her chest marking her an outlier, deviated from the norm she had so desperately wanted to fit into as a pre-teen girl). 'Enough' is a concept that is nigh unattainable, and that is difficult for people to understand. She likes to think that they understand. That they congratulate her on every B she earns on an English test with the knowledge that it was an uphill battle. She likes to think the unplaceable thing on Brian's face right now means 'I understand'. And Beverly trusts them enough that even if it isn't 'I understand', it's 'I'm trying to'.

At which point her deep and philosophical (and _embarrassingly_ sappy) thought patterns are interrupted by a loud string of curses from Jimmy's room, followed by one of the best things Beverly has heard anyone say, a sentence that will stick in her mind for a good long while.

“You – you're like one of those ridiculous – I don't know – hats – that say 'one size fits all' but actually doesn't fit anyone, because you're – you're made of – awful!”

Jimmy sounds so _indignant_ that, armed with the knowledge that there was _nobody_ in the house he could possibly be talking to, Beverly and Brian collapse, shoulders pressed together, shaking hard with laughter. Eventually she manages to gasp out 'what happened', to which they hear, floating from the open window: “Freaking EXTENSION CORD got tangled with the RADIATOR CORD and my HEADPHONES freaking AGAIN.”

When Jimmy finally manages to lever himself out of the window, laptop and cord first passed up to Beverly, blanket curled around his shoulders like a cape, he gives them an odd look.

“What were you two talking about?” he asks, sitting down on Beverly's other side with a huff, tossing one end of the blanket to Brian and wrapping his end around his outside shoulder, leaving her in the middle, bracketed on either side, her back buffered from the cold by the comforter Jimmy's dragged off his bed.

“Nothing important,” she replies, and if she closes her eyes for a second while the episode is loading, savoring the feeling of being carefree on a roof at dusk on a Friday, her dearest friends alongside her, the feeling of being _enough_ , well.

Nobody has to know about it.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed it, please leave a comment! So I know I'm not broadcasting into the void here.


End file.
